Arts and Letters

When Irving Howe died last year, it was almost inevitable that so many writers—friends, colleagues, students—would cite, in what they wrote or said of him, the epigraph to Steady Work, his important 1966 collection of essays, which explained its title. It points so directly to the essence of Irving's life as a writer, and beyond that, to what the calling of a literary and social critic ultimately entails, that it seems apposite this evening as well. It goes as follows: Once in Chelm, the mythical village of the East European Jews, a man was appointed to sit at the village gate and wait for the coming of the Messiah. He complained to the village elders that his pay was too low. “You are right,” they said to him, “the pay is low. But consider: the work is steady.” It is indeed steady work being a responsible utopian—to the degree that hoping and working and thinking for an undogmatic American version of democratic socialism has remained utopian.

The nature of Irving Howe's steady work as a writer and as a rare kind of teacher can be traced through the titles of his books. They are of two sorts. The first indicates subject and range of concern, starting with a history of Walter Reuther and the UAW in 1946, and including studies of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Politics and the Novel, Leon Trotsky, and The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson. The other titles, like that of his 1982 intellectual memoir, Margin of Hope, together characterize a critical temperament; among them are A World More Attractive, The Decline of the New, The Critical Point, Celebrations and Attacks. These are collections of essays, whether political, cultural, or literary—I think now of remarkably fine ones on E. A. Robinson, Céline, George Eliot, T. E. Lawrence, Isaac Babel, Zola, and Dreiser. He always had a singular devotion to a form about which he approvingly quoted George Orwell, to the effect that “The essay has been, and in our day remains, one of the major forms of intellectual discourse; it enforces economy, discourages pedantry, and is more pitiless than the longer forms in exposing a writer's failings.” Irving knew that in our world not yet more attractive, it is the critic's own writing which has to keep him honest.

He was born in 1920 in New York City, growing up in the East Bronx, where his family had moved under reduced circumstances in 1930. He later wrote that “during the years of my early adolescence, I read an immense amount of poetry, certainly more than I ever have since….” It was also at about the age of fourteen that he first attended meetings of a local chapter of the Young People's Socialist League; in his middle and later teens he actively participated in a number of socialist youth groups and “unlike a good many of my contemporaries” he later observed, “I feel no regret; never having succumbed to the falsities of Stalinism I have not had to fall into another extreme as a gesture of extenuation.” He attended CCNY from 1936 to 1940, then did a semester of graduate work in English at Brooklyn College, but “found the routine of graduate study appalling and quit.” Of his years in the army in World War II, he spent one and one-half of them in Alaska, sorting out documents from abandoned Aleutian island posts, saving some and stuffing the others into the potbellied stove which helped keep his workplace bearably warm. But it was there, he said, that “in frozen isolation, I did an immense amount of reading in fields I never expect to touch again, unless some unhappy shift of events thrusts me once more into such a situation; it was graduate school, modern style.” To this graduate school he brought the commitment to democratic socialism which framed his intellectual and critical consciousness. After leaving the army, he began to write beyond the intense but ever-narrowing sectarian milieu of the anti-Stalinist left, starting with reviews and then extending to longer pieces.

I first encountered Irving through his writing—the book on Sherwood Anderson and the one on Faulkner. But I first actually met him in the summer of 1953 at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana, where I was a student and he—with Cleanth Brooks, Alfred Kazin, Lizzy Hardwick (along with Cal Lowell and Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz who have died since) were among the, for me, overwhelmingly distinguished visitors. Irving was just starting out as a teacher; for the past four years he had been regularly reviewing books for Time—along with Robert Fitzgerald, James Agee, Nigel Dennis, and Louis Kronenberger, those interestingly dissident members of the intelligentsia that T. S. Matthews had assembled.

The class I took with him that summer was a seminar on the political novel—we read among others The Charterhouse of Parma, Under Western Eyes, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Possessed, in which he explored at considerable length the association of character and ideology. At the time he was working through the material of his splendid and lucid book, Politics and the Novel, which was published in 1957. As a teacher—he was just starting out at this—he was informal, energetic, alternately Socratic and totally unironic in his probing questions, pointedly anecdotal and always searching. Throughout our subsequent friendship of almost forty years, he continually exhibited the kind of generous enthusiasm that I first encountered then in his brief oral or epistolary introductions to books he considered remarkable and urged you to rediscover for yourself: submerged American minor classics, like Harold Frederick’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, or E. A. Robinson's remarkable narrative poem “Isaac and Archibald,” surely one of the great American accounts of youthful initiation, and, when I was still in my early twenties, The House of Mirth and much of Willa Cather. What so many of us learned generally from him—and what the Professoriat now seems largely to have forgotten—is that the primal scene of literary criticism involves a reader coming across something, calling out to someone else "Listen to this!" and then reading it aloud. And then being prepared to point out just how, and why, the passage is either marvellous or dreadful or whatever else. That voice for me will always be particularly Irving’s.

That was also the summer in which there appeared the volume he’d edited of Yiddish short stories in translation; I remember a talk he gave to the School of Letters faculty and students on the language and some of the literature in it. This commitment to the literature of what was a dying language, and what it might do in, for, and with American literature generally, remained central for him. He co-edited five subsequent volumes of Yiddish poetry and prose in translation between 1971 and 1987; in the case of two of these, he worked hard and very generously with a considerable number of American poets many of whom had little or no reading knowledge of Yiddish. In his most popular work, World of Our Fathers (1976), he tried to represent the social, cultural, and political world of eastern-European immigrant Jews in America over the previous hundred years—a book which had great influence on subsequent cultural enterprises, from the spread of third generation klezmer music to recent filmmaking.

In 1954, shortly after starting to teach at Brandeis, he embarked on the founding of Dissent, which he edited until his death (it has just published its fortieth anniversary issue under the able editorship of Michael Walzer and Mitchell Cohen). This magazine reflected a wide and internally dissenting range of interests, and I remember him saying that first year that he felt the need of getting printed up for himself, not so much Edmund Wilson’s famous card with the long list of things he declined to do, but rather a version of H. L. Mencken’s: “Dear sir or madam, you may very well be right. Irving Howe.” Yet Dissent always bore Irving's personal mark of believing so much in certain deep principles of American liberalism that it could be saddened or outraged when particular instances of liberal ideology or expression seemed patently unworthy of those principles. And yet he never would renounce them.

Zeal, engagement, sympathy—like piety, these are no particular respecters of intellectual conscience, and to possess such virtues while yet keeping them honest was one of Irving’s great and exemplary concerns. He was as set against mindless and irresponsible praise—a form of intellectual dishonesty not usually acknowledged—in his writing as in his private criticism, the commentary he gave to friends and students: his very specific indication of what he might not have liked, and why, in something you’d written allowed you to trust his expressions of pleasure in what he did like. There is a kind of pragmatism which can live in loving friendship with a kind of utopian imagination, and they did so in Irving Howe. (I can't help but feel that the shape of this imagination was revealed in some of the great attachments of his later life—to the painting of Vuillard and Bonnard, and to the great corpus of George Balanchine's ballets.)

Irving was perhaps fortunate in being able to do his work as a literary and social critic at a time in late twentieth-century America when there was still a literate community outside as well as inside the universities. And, too, as a university teacher of literature, he typified a span of about three and a half decades which saw the rise and fall of a widely read and intellectually inquiring community among the professors of literature. His lessons were of scepticism and hope, and not their dreadful impersonators, cynicism and ruthless idealistic certainty. He will continue to be missed by the shrinking ranks of the serious in America. His working life was finished but incomplete—steady work of his kind can never be completed. Irving would not have wanted either to be sent off or remembered with pieties, but rather with grimly yet somehow cheerfully acknowledged ironies. He hardly guided his life by talmudic injunction. But he knew, and his life has reminded us, that “if it is not given us to complete the work, neither may we abandon it.”